Mission: Irresistible Frank Ray Rescues Airplanes. Not For The Money. Just For The Fun Of It.

June 9, 1985|By Philip Singerman of the Sentinel Staff

Frank Ray jumps from the gutted cabin of the twin-engine Piper Navajo, hollering for his vest before he even lands on the concrete floor of the hangar, located at the back end of Miami International Airport, where he works rebuilding damaged airplanes. ''If someone's going to take my picture,'' he shouts, ''I have to be wearing my vest. That way I'll feel more natural, more in my element.''

Ray, a tall, lean man of 49 with neatly combed gray hair and a chaw of tobacco in his cheek, disappears into his office at the rear of the hangar, emerging moments later with his sport shirt off and his vest on his back. He puts on a pair of shades and a satin baseball hat with wings on the sides, sticks a .357-magnum revolver in his waistband and leans grinning against the fuselage of the Piper Navajo. His mouth is resolute. His hands are strong and steady. Under the glasses, his eyes are clear, his gaze unflinching. If you needed a pilot to get you out of a tight place in a hurry, you'd hire him in a heartbeat.

As a getaway plane, however, the Piper Navajo would give you pause. For one thing, its engines are gone and its landing gear has been removed. For another, the left wing has been stripped of its metal skin and resembles the skeletal remains of half a pterodactyl. The plane is owned by a Panamanian of considerable means. During a landing, its left landing gear collapsed, wreaking all manner of structural havoc, though leaving the occupants unscathed. Frank Ray, an airplane mechanic of uncommon skill, is supervising the plane's reconstruction. Every bent, twisted and ruptured part will be replaced or rebuilt. When the team of men working under him is through, Ray, a designated air-worthiness representative for the Federal Aviation Administration, will take the plane up to determine whether it's fit to fly. ''Occasionally, after major repairs, they'll do some strange things up there and surprise me,'' he says with a grin, ''but usually when we get done with 'em they fly just like new.''

The vest Frank Ray wears is actually a brown World War II Eisenhower jacket with the sleeves lopped off. It is covered with patches. ''Every patch on this vest has a story behind it,'' Ray says. ''Behind every one there's an adventure.''

''This one here,'' he says, pointing to a multicolored insignia, chest- high on the left front, ''is from the Venezuelan equivalent of our FBI or CIA. I did some exercises with the group one time.'' He points to another patch, a set of wings. ''This one is from Nicaragua. I'm an honorary senior pilot in their air force.'' There is also a large rectangular patch with a confederate flag on it that occupies most of the back of the vest. It names Ray as a rebel aviator -- one of ''Martin's Maurauders.'' That patch, and the vest, were given to him by Martin Caidin, the Gainesville author who's novel, Cyborg, was the basis for the television series The Six Million Dollar Man. At a cost of nearly $250,000, Ray restored Caidin's World War II German transport plane -- a JU-52, or Junkers -- which had been sitting for years in the jungles of Ecuador. ''It had been in the jungle so long that, among other things, we found snake skins and animal hides down inside the wings.''

There is no patch for fixing planes like the Navajo and test-flying them. To most people, the thought of lifting off the ground in an untried, newly rebuilt airplane is considerably more chilling than, say, driving the family sedan after a fender's been replaced. But as far as Frank Ray is concerned, that's the mundane side of his work.

Take, for example, the time the twin-engine Beechcraft crashed into the side of a mountain in the Peruvian Andes. Ordinarily, a plane like that would have been left where it lay to become an aeronautically shaped ice sculpture. This Twin-Beech, though, was equipped with $8 million worth of sensitive electronic equipment, and the people who had dispatched the plane wanted it back. Frank Ray led an expedition up the mountainside, supervised the disassembly of the plane, carted the pieces back down the mountain and re- constructed the whole thing to American FAA standards.

''What you do to get jobs like that done is use good old American ingenuity,'' Ray says. ''It's like the time I had to install a new turbine engine on a plane in a remote region of the Yucatan Peninsula. Some government guy down there had driven the plane into a giant hole in what they called the runway, and really messed it up. Talk about the middle of nowhere. But this was a very expensive, sophisticated airplane and it had to be fixed. We used an old rafter timber, a length of rope and a pair of rusty pliers to install the engine. The plane flew fine.''